


There's a Rhythm in Rush These Days (Where the Lights Don't Move and the Colors Don't Fade)

by JackEPeace



Category: I Am The Night (TV 2019)
Genre: Domestic, F/M, Ficlet, Fluff, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:55:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27447487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JackEPeace/pseuds/JackEPeace
Summary: She’d told him, once, that she thought there was grace out there for him, if only he could find it.And he found her, and he wonders if that’s the same thing.
Relationships: Fauna Hodel/Jay Singletary
Comments: 5
Kudos: 9





	There's a Rhythm in Rush These Days (Where the Lights Don't Move and the Colors Don't Fade)

**Author's Note:**

> So I know it's a little bit like shouting into the void with this fandom, but I'll never get tired of writing about them, or thinking about them, or watching the show so hey, why not? And yes, I ship them. And, you know what, it makes me happy. So have a pointless domestic ficlet that I needed to take some heaviness off my heart. And yes, it's set after the show.
> 
> Title from "Stay Alive" by Jose Gonzalez.

They’ve started something, but Jay isn’t sure what. Sometimes, he thinks he’s better off not thinking about it at all. When have words and their meaning ever helped him out of anything? 

She spends a lot of her time in his apartment and he finds that he likes it more than he thought he would. It’s a different place than the one he’d had before, though Jay figures there isn’t much to be said about it in terms of improvement. Maybe a few less water stains on the ceiling. A few less cockroaches in the hallway. But it’s still the apartment of a man who has somehow never managed to find his footing even all these years later. The space is improved, he thinks, by having her in it. 

Jay likes her shoes by the door. Her jacket across the back of one of the kitchen chairs. He likes the way the orange of the streetlights outside washes across her hair while she sleeps, tucked with her forehead against his side, a weight in a bed he’d gotten used to sleeping in alone. He’s sure he hasn’t said it out loud. Any of it. Why would he? It’s only when a thing is out of his head that it has any sort of power against him. 

He asked her about it once, one night when the streetlights made the room orange and she was mostly asleep and his fingers were carding through her hair and making it coil in messy wisps against her collarbone. “Do you like it? Here?” 

He’d meant here. In the apartment. With him. In this spot against his side, with his fingers in her hair. But when she’d said “hmm?” in the half-asleep tone that he’d come to like, too, he’d chickened out and amended his question. “In L.A.” 

“Yes.” Her breath had been a tickle against the bare skin of his arm, warm. “Better than Sparks.” 

“Doesn’t sound like that would be hard to do.” 

She’d smiled in the orange darkness of the room and the smile had lingered on her face as her breathing had evened out and Jay had realized, and probably not for the first time, that he liked a lot of things about her, not just her sleep-heavy tone or a half-smile in the darkness. 

It still scares him, this realization. The fact that he knows what she looks like in the morning or in the night when she dreams. Or that his heart jumps at the sound of her key in the door. It’s been months, half a year, more, and he thinks it’ll probably never stop scaring him. But still, he doesn’t ask for her key back, doesn’t suggest that they don’t do the ubiquitous  _ this _ anymore. Instead, he makes coffee in the morning and puts two mugs on the counter and makes sure to keep sugar in his apartment because she likes hers a little bit sweeter. 

She’d told him, once, that she thought there was grace out there for him, if only he could find it.

And he found her, and he wonders if that’s the same thing. 

On the nights when she spends the night in his apartment, it’s the mornings he likes the best. The moments when he gets to open his eyes and see her there and realize that, for a little longer at least, he gets to have her there. He gets the sound of her voice in an apartment that is no longer too quiet. He gets to have a reason to bypass the bar in favor of home. He gets to have a reason to try and make someone smile, for once. 

They have something of a routine, too, something else that terrifies Jay as much as it thrills him. Patterns and predictability are just two more things Jay Singletary thought he would never be privy to. It feels less like a cage and more like a long-held exhale. 

Jay loves to lay on his back, watching the room brighten from the rising sun, and listen to the sounds of her in the shower. The smell of shampoo and steam as it escapes through the crack in the door. The way she hums to herself, quiet, under her breath, like she doesn’t want to have to admit to doing it at all. Some song by Bowie or Janis or Dylan that Jay knows now only because of her, because when they drive together with the windows down and the radio on, she smiles and he teases her and acts like the sound of the music on the radio doesn’t remind him of her even when they aren’t together. 

When the shower switches off, Jay takes that as his cue to finally kick aside the sheets from around his ankles and get up. His mornings are much friendlier than they used to be; most of the time they don’t start off with a pounding in his head, a burning in his throat, the taste of dead dog in his mouth. Now they start with humming, with the shudder of the building’s shitty pipes, with Fauna wrapped in a towel in front of a foggy mirror, droplets of water collected on the constellation of freckles on her back. 

By the time Jay finishes his own shower, Fauna is in the kitchen, the radio on, the volume at a low murmur, as she fixes breakfast with a fierce sort of concentration on her face. It’s a look he’s come to know, too, the expression she seems to wear when she does just about anything. It makes her look like the serious girl he’d first met years ago, the one who might as well have been running around chasing ghosts for all the good she was doing. And he’d known a thing or two about chasing ghosts. 

He likes to press his lips to the furrow between her eyes, likes to feel the uptick of her lips against his as he moves from her forehead to the bridge of her nose and finally to her lips, and he wonders if it’ll always feel like she’s simply been waiting on him to kiss her all along. 

So often, as his fingers slip through her hair, he finds the curve of the scar there, left behind years ago by the man who’d tried to kill her in the basement of a building outside of town. He hadn’t thought much about that moment then, but Jay thinks a lot about it now, every time he feels the scar there, every time his thumb brushes against it when they sit together on the couch or lay together in bed. There had been no way of knowing then where they would be now. Still, Jay is grateful he’d seen her slip down that hallway, had seen Sepp go after her. It feels far away in a way Korea never does, like a memory he’s put to rest, satisfied that it’s over. 

There’s a seriousness to Fauna that he finds as intriguing as he does comforting, how she manages to be a sort of anchor, unruffled and steady. She makes him want to be that, too, for someone. For once. 

Even still, as they eat breakfast in the kitchen, or takeout in the living room, he tries to make her smile, vindicated when he does, even more so when she laughs, when she leans into him, her shoulder pressed to his side, her head falling to his shoulder. His nose presses to the nape of her neck, to the lingering smell of his soap on her skin, and he can feel the beating of her heart. He’d stopped believing in miracles long ago. But that still manages to feel like one. 

A miracle, too, that not once but twice they’d managed to find each other. That he’d come back to the city and so had she. That their paths had happened to cross, that he was a bit like Bogart, that out of all the diners in all of the city he’d had to walk into hers. She’d been another one of his ghosts, then, but when he’d blinked and squinted, he hadn’t seen her at all as a girl shivering in someone else’s nightie with blood under her nose. He’d seen the years that had settled between them, the way she held her chin up, her head high, her hair long past her shoulders, and she’d worn her surprise better than he had, pointing him to a booth and telling him to sit and bringing him coffee and acting like she was glad to see him. When it had begun to matter, when he’d invited her to his place, fallen asleep beside her, given her the key, made her laugh over breakfast, he isn’t even sure he could say. But they’re here now, and Jay thinks that’s the important thing.

That the important thing is knowing how she likes her coffee. Or knowing the names of the people she works with, so he can follow her stories as she relays them at the end of the day, the TV on but unnoticed in the corner, her fingers tip-toeing absently up and down the inside of his arm. Or that he knows what it looks like when the orange of the streetlights collects in her hair as she sleeps. 

He makes it his goal to make her smile, but, the thing is, she doesn’t even have to try with him. It comes easier now, and with sincerity, and he doesn’t mind that, either. He’d spent so long worrying about someone keeping him tied to the earth that he didn’t realize it could be nice, too. 

Now, it doesn’t really take much to make him smile at all.

The sound of her key in the door is always a good start. 


End file.
